The Blood Star (8 page)

“Do you think he suspects?” I asked, when
Hiram was out of sight. Kephalos shrugged his shoulders.

“It would not surprise me, but it changes
nothing. He will whisper nothing of his surmises to his
followers—why should he? What would he gain? So we are left where
we were, a choice between the one enemy we know or the many we do
not. I see no reason to alter our plans.”

I will report only one more incident from
that journey. It happened after we had broken camp, when the sun
was still cool and we had mounted our horses and had found the way
south. As we passed that cluster of mud huts where we had been
entertained the previous night, we saw that the headman, his cousin
Tudi—the old soldier who had seen me at Khalule—and all the men of
the village were there lining the road, come out to watch us as we
departed. They did not speak. They offered no salute. They merely
stood there in the dust and kept their vigil as we passed by. Yet
in its way it was an occasion as solemn as the feast of Akitu, when
the god is carried from his shrine to greet the new year. I felt
their eyes upon me, like the weight of a pledge, and knew that they
knew, had known all along, and that this honor was intended for
me.

III

There is an ancient proverb that the road to
Babylon is paved with corpses. Even now, nearly a lifetime later, I
have only to close my eyes and think of the southern lands, the
most wicked place the gods made, and dread floods my soul. My
nostrils fill with the odor of death. I hear the cawing of crows
as, their bellies heavy with carrion, they flap their black wings
above the bodies of the slain.

In the land where I first drew breath the men
of Ashur may stand at the edge of the cold, swift-flowing Tigris
and see mountains in the distance. The gods, it is said, love to
dwell in high places, so we felt ourselves always to be living
under their gaze, as does the child under the eyes of his parents.
It is not so in the Land of Sumer, where the dusty brown earth
stretches flat for as far as mortal sight can reach. There no one
loves the gods, though all fear them, and the minds of men grow
dark with treachery.

I had first come to this place as part of the
army the Lord Sennacherib, my king and father, had raised to punish
the Elamites for murdering his son, Ashurnadinshum, whom he had
made king of Babylon, and for stirring the southern lands to
rebellion. We stood against our enemy at a place called Khalule—may
its name disappear forever and the very ground perish. It was a
terrible battle, where countless good men died, where for me the
illusion of glory perished with them, but it was only the first of
many horrors I saw in that long war.

We sacked many cities, leveling their walls
and the houses of their great men, burning their grain stores that
the survivors might perish of want before the next harvest. We laid
siege to Babylon herself for over a year, drying up the river that
watered her, starving her people so that few were left to die by
the sword. And at last, when we took her, for five long days we
murdered and pillaged, for pity had died in our hearts.

Thus, had I no other reason, I could have
hated the Land of Sumer and all who dwelled in her, for what my
sojourn there had forced me to see within my own breast.

Not that these thoughts alone occupied my
mind, for I studied my part as the Lord Hugieia’s surly, brutish
servant with great care, encouraging Hiram’s men to shun me,
closing my mind to everything spoken in my presence, speaking
myself to no one except Kephalos. And I felt the strain of it, as
one must who cannot permit himself even to relax the muscles of his
face without hazarding his life. Yet the mask must slip now and
then, even if I was never aware of it. As the days wore on, Hiram
seemed to find me an increasingly interesting object of
scrutiny.

His men, however, paid us no heed but went
about their business and saw to their own comforts as if Kephalos
and I did not exist. We welcomed their indifference. It was a
measure of our comparative safety.

Although I can think of no reason why it
should be so, it has always been my experience that a caravan makes
slower progress even than an army on campaign. These Hittite
barbarians could be expected to take no notice of the month’s five
evil days, during which men who fear the gods dress in rags,
abstain from their wives, and neither work nor travel nor eat any
food cooked in a pot, yet a commander serving Ashur’s king would
have flogged to death any soldier who dragged along as they did.
Hiram made no complaint, however; he seemed to accept the slack
pace of his drivers as normal. It was eight full days before we
watered our horses in the Euphrates, and still, I heard the drivers
say, we would not reach Babylon before a month had closed its door
behind us.

The evening we made our first camp on the
bluffs overlooking the Euphrates, I took a leather bucket and went
down to the river to fetch water for our cooking pot. There were
ducks among the reeds and I thought, If I but had a net. . .

But I did not have a net. I sat on the bank
for a long while, merely watching them, pleased with the bright
green feathers along their backs and the way their yellow feet
kicked in the air as they struggled to dive for roots from the
muddy bottom. Finally I was glad I did not have a net. I filled my
bucket—carefully, lest I frighten them—and made ready to go.

Just as I stood up, a stone struck the water
and the ducks scattered, their wings thrashing at the river’s
surface as they called out their alarm. I turned and saw Hiram
standing on the bluff above me. He was grinning, as if he had
achieved some victory.

“You are annoyed? I have disturbed your
little reverie?” he asked, precisely as if he expected me to
understand his words. “You are an odd one. If you were my property,
I would have you whipped for loafing about like this. A slave with
a taste for private reflection is a nuisance. And perhaps a danger
as well.

“The burn—it heals slowly, does it?” He
pointed to my right hand, which was still wrapped in a strip of
soiled bandage. “Does it not give you pain to carry such a heavy
bucket?”

He was right, of course. I resisted the
temptation to switch the bucket to my other hand. He spoke in
Aramaic; I was supposed to be ignorant of that tongue. I would not
betray myself any more than I had already.

Without a word, I climbed up the bluff and
pushed past him as if he were merely an object in the way. As I
walked back to camp, I could hear his laughter behind me.

I was finding that it is a vexatious thing to
be a servant. Kephalos always insisted, and with some justice, that
the water of the Euphrates is not fit to wash one’s face in until
it has been strained several times through a wool cloak. Yet no
matter how many times I performed this operation, inevitably he
would wrinkle his nose at the first sip and comment that the foul
stuff was still so thick with mud that a man might be tempted to
make bricks with it.

“The next time you can fetch the water, and
strain it through your own cloak—which, by the way, is no cleaner
than my own.”

“And I put it to you, Lord, how would that
seem to our friends?” He sat back, bracing his hands against the
bulging waist of his tunic as if I had profaned myself before the
bright gods. “I, Hugieia of Naxos, doing a slave’s work for him?
Have some respect for appearances, and let us not bring scandal
among these honest thieves by outraging the usages of the world.
There is a distance between master and servant which must be
respected—did you hear me complaining when, as a boy in the house
of war, you set me to clean the dust from your sandals?”

“Yes, and bitterly.”

“And what of it? Even a slave has a right to
grumble.”

“Grumble was all you did—grumble and play at
dice with the soldiers. I never had a decent day’s work out of
you.”

“And did I not always give you your fair
share of my winnings? Did I not through my labors make you a rich
man in the Land of Ashur? Are we not this moment making our escape
with the treasure that I and I alone was wise enough to lay aside
for such an emergency? And have I not, in my wisdom and care for
you, deposited great wealth with the merchants of Egypt, that your
life in exile will be such that even a prince would not disdain?
Have I not done all this? Besides, a slave’s life was not to my
taste. I was not born to it.”

“Neither was I, so you need not upset
yourself thus. And cease complaining about the water.”

“Oh, very well.”

He sat watching me for a moment, like a
physician at the bedside of a child, stroking his beard as if it
were a cat’s back. Then he nodded, apparently satisfied with the
results of his meditations.

“You are annoyed with more than my poor
self,” he said at last. “Has something happened this morning about
which I remain uninformed? You are the prey perhaps of unpleasant
reflections?”

“I had an encounter with the worthy Hiram,
not an hour ago, down at the river. He knows all about us. He seems
almost to make a joke of it.”

“He may guess much, but he knows
nothing.”

“In the end he will sell us to
Esarhaddon.”

“In the end, yes—if any of us are privileged
to reach the end. But first he will try to squeeze what he can from
me, and that gives us more than enough time to safeguard ourselves
against future troubles. Be at peace, Lord. Do not be apprehensive
over distant evils.”

“I still believe it would be wisest to kill
him now.”

“Would you so willingly pollute your soul
with murder?” He raised his eyebrows in astonishment. “Besides, as
I have pointed out before, at present the caravan master serves our
purposes as well as his own. We have nothing to fear from him until
we reach Babylon.”

Babylon. We could see her walls, still broken
in places, even after all that time, three days before we reached
her gates, but distance lent no charm. She rose up from the flat
brown earth like a ruined mountain, the stronghold of some god long
since cast down from heaven. My guts clenched at the sight of
her.

At night, the priests of Marduk were busy. In
the center of the city the fires atop the great ziggurat burned
with black-red flames, offering sacrifice of blood and fearful
pain. We saw them, camped three days’ ride away. Anyone with eyes
could see them.

I could remember other flames. I had seen the
whole city burning. I had helped to set the fire in Marduk’s temple
and, not many months after, I had watched Mushezib-Marduk, once
lord of Babylon, a wicked king indeed and the author of much
suffering, boiled alive in a bronze jug, over a fire fueled by the
corpses of his queen and children. These things were done in time
of war, the works of war’s cruel passions, but those passions still
heated the blood, even after years of peace. The Babylonians had
not forgotten, and neither had I.

Long after the cooking stones had grown cold
I sat wrapped in my cloak, watching the distant, pulsing glow of
that sacrificial fire, knowing the priests did their work at
Esarhaddon’s command, wondering what ghost within himself he hoped
to quiet with all this spectacle of pious terror.

Esarhaddon was a born soldier. The man had
not yet opened his eyes who could frighten him. Cheerfully he would
pitch himself into the worst of the fighting, heedless of death,
but as soon as he lay down his sword demons began flapping their
silent wings over his head. He feared the gods, naming each of them
in turn as he quaked with horror. He feared the omens of their
wrath and saw them everywhere. He feared the ghosts of the unquiet
dead. He feared the spirits without number that claim to dwell in
every corner of the wide earth.

And as king he had too much time to listen to
the mutterings of priests. Since the voice of Shamash, Lord of
Decision, had named him to succeed our father, he had not had a
quiet hour. I could have pitied him had he not turned his hand
against me. It was not in me to pity one who would have hunted me
to my death, yet I could have pitied him, for the gods had played
him an evil trick to make him king.

For he was the king, and it was at his word
that the priests were busy and the sacrificial fires lit the night
skies.

Babylon, city of wickedness, city of turning
minds, glory and curse of men.

On the day we came under the shadow of the
Ishtar Gate, in the first hour before noon, slaves past counting,
their legs caked with mud, their knobby backs bent beneath the
weight of bricks hardened almost to stone in the pale winter sun,
were trudging up the long, ragged stairway of a wall shattered by
the king my father and the will of Ashur, rising now once again to
please the king my brother, that the will of Marduk might be done.
Slaves as gaunt as corpses, hardly bleeding from the great gashes
on knees which a hundred times had buckled under their
burdens—theirs was a living death; a few months, a year perhaps of
toil and suffering before they starved, or their lungs burst, and
their souls left their unburied bodies to flutter off into the
barren night. No bread or wine would comfort these ghosts. Forever
would they whirl about the wall they had built with their misery,
cursing all those who dwelt within.

“It rises—you see? In two years it will be as
it was in the days of the great kings. Hah, hah, hah!”

Hiram of Latakia laughed like a jackal, as if
this city, where he had not been born, which could be nothing to
him, constituted some personal triumph.

“Yes,” Kephalos answered, drawing in the
reins a little to trim his horse’s pace. “So it is feared in the
north.”

“Let them fear what they like in their mud
villages. I will retire to raise grapes in the Lebanon, a rich man
thanks to Marduk’s anger. Then let them wash the ground with their
blood for all I care. Hah, hah, hah!”